


And Light Will Wash Them Over

by MacaroniSwirls



Category: Homestuck
Genre: It's okay to ship Equius pale with someone else because NEPETA IS DEEEAAAD, Pale Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-13
Updated: 2012-02-13
Packaged: 2017-10-31 02:14:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MacaroniSwirls/pseuds/MacaroniSwirls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a small offshoot timeline in the veil, Equius and Eridan meet up after everyone starts dying. It goes about as well as one would expect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Light Will Wash Them Over

“You know, I always kind of thought people died differently. Like, you know in those movies? Whenever people knew they were about to die, some would freak out, some would be calm, others would go find a way, and others would just vow to kill everyone first. I really liked that.”

“Yes, seadweller.” Equius Zahhak doesn’t have the nerve to call him highblood, he doesn’t have the nerve to do much anything right now. There’s indigo blood splattered all over his wifebeater, and green blood scattered at his shoes, and he’s trying to think very hard about what that means.

“And the thing was – the thing was, in real life, it’s not like that. In real life, they see the lasers coming, and they all screamed, every last one of them. Some fought back, of course, but it was always just a ‘we don’t want to die’. And you just get so used to it – watching trolls scream to protect their lusii, watching trolls scream to protect themselves, and I think that’s when I realized how pathetic you landdwellers were. All they did was scream.”

He takes a step forward. You take a step back. He takes another step forward, and this pattern continues until he manages to get the wand stuck in the small of his throat, and Eridan glowers down at Equius.

“So, lowblood, can you prove me wrong?”

There’s a long moment before the lower of the two speak, and said lowblood is drenching in sweat and fear. “Ampora, if you want me to be truly honest, I wouldn’t quite mind being dead. “

And it’s at this point Eridan notices the similarities between them – not the internal, but the ones seen with the naked eye. He sees the green and purple on both of them, the blood of their admired and beloved.

“Me too,” the seadweller says, and Equius sees a shattering behind his eyes, a similarity in pain.

There is only one difference: Equius had endured, while Eridan had killed.  
-

He walks like a broken mirror trying to be whole, Equius decides. Someone who has broken themselves so far that they are now nothing but a binding of scattered thoughts, trying to form together into some kind of whole. Instead, there is a loose connection of scattered parts, each one reflecting a different image, each one fluid in its prominence. Here is Eridan Ampora, royal highblood; here is Eridan Ampora, broken hearted; here is Eridan Ampora, heartless traitor; here is Eridan Ampora, who walks like a wounded animal trapped in a corner.

He tries to be all of them, and, paradoxally, ends up being none. Here is Eridan Ampora, Prince of Hope, and if there's one rule of sgrub, it's that you can't shatter your element without shattering yourself. 

Equius wants to say something, but he knows that he himself now also walks differently.

-

“Why are you following me?” He’s finally speaking properly to Equius, and he’s putting up a front, trying to look angry and authoritative. He has his horns bared at him, and half a snarl is inscribed on his face.

“I have to keep an eye on you.”

“Don’t act like Karkat didn’t order you all just to kill me, I know I’m just a traitor to you guys, so why don’t you just get it over with-“

“You aren’t the only one to have gone insane. Gamzee flipped out shortly after you. Karkat would much rather try to keep as many of us as calm and alive as possible, and for once I agree with him. I’ve already had to get rid of one highblood, I would much prefer not to have to subdue another one.”

Eridan glances Equius once over, taking a look at the familiar purple and green.

“I never expected you to have the fuckin’ guts to take down a highblood. Honestly, I have to say I’m shocked.”

“He killed Nepeta.”

Eridan shrugs, and walks away, the careful steps of Equius following him.

-

"I...I kind of forget on how I had planned on getting there," Eridan admits. And there is nothing before them now, nothing but this large expanse of veil in front of them. 

“I think I was expecting luck to somehow happen, like maybe Bec Noir would’ve just magically appeared, or…I don’t know.”

“I was wondering how you’d do that. I’d assumed that you had something planned.” 

“Sorry to disappoint.”

The two of them just look out a bit, looking into the veil completely surrounding them and engulfing them in its sheer mass. Something beautiful might’ve been said about this phenomenon of the outer realm, the vast emptiness and yet the vast filledness of it, but right now it just made them feel small, and alienated. 

Eridan turns his eyes from the void and walks away. “Stop following me.”

Equius follows, and Eridan has long lost the nerve to do that about it. It crosses his mind, but the colors on his shirt prevent him from acting on it.

-_-

Eridan isn’t dead, but the person in front of him is. She is bleeding purple-pink and it’s probably a bit unhealthy the way he’s looking at her, pity overflowing from his eyes. In the literal manner – there’s a bit of purple leaking from his eyes, and it’s highly inappropriate for a highblood to conduct himself in a lowly manner around one beneath him.

Equius isn’t really sure if he cares about that anymore, but he thinks it anyway.

“Eridan, we need to go.”

Eridan just sits there, and watches, and there is that small hint of psychosis in his eyes, the hint found in most highbloods, and Equius knows he should quell this now before things get worse. 

“Eridan.”

The highblood doesn’t respond.

“Eridan.”

The highblood doesn’t respond.

“Eridan.”

He clenches his fist a moment, and Equius sees purple blood where nails are running to deep, and Eridan swallows the guilt built in his throat and responds.

“Can we rearrange her? She looks so dead.”

The dead seadweller is a bit askew, her hair is clumped to her blood and her blood is clumped everywhere. Her arms are still askew, and her eyes have this wide panic in them. 

Death has gained lots of skill in etching a person’s final moments. 

“Eridan, I see no problem in doing that. I believe it is proper etiquette to make ones friends look at least peaceful in death.”

“You do it.”

There’s a pause, and then you stammer. “But-“

“I don’t deserve to touch her.”

There’s another pause, and then Equius hesitantly lifts up the princess from the pile of horn.

HONK

The princess clatters to the floor, and if anything, looks more disturbed than before, and he takes a look for the noise, but it’s just the horn, he just disturbed a horn, is all-

Eridan stares at Equius, and his eyes shift to the form splayed on the floor, and Equius isn’t sure what in his eyes anymore. It’s still a bit mad, in the insane sense, but it’s also mad in the sense of basic anger, and there’s distress, and sadness, and horror, but in the end, even though other emotions could rise up and take over the seadweller’s whole being, his expression still just looks hopeless. A mad sort of hopeless, but still hopeless.

“Come on, let’s go.” The seadweller says. 

Kanaya’s body lies nearby. It is now more clear how Eridan got the purple and green blood on his clothes.  
-_-_-

It comes to pass that they go to that obscure part of the veil, the one trekked only a few times during a trek of the say. There’re a few treasure chests here, and for some reason the two of you take it to open some of them in the hopes of finding something useful. After finding Fiduspawn cards, a sullied Nic Cage poster, and a segment of an old shipping journal, they stop and decide just to ignore the rest.

“Didn’t Nep have that shipping wall or whatever. Why’s she need a journal?”

“She didn’t have a wall to write on in the game.”

Eridan flips through it casually. “Who the hell ships their denizens?”

Equius casually whips it back, and pockets it. “That’s none of your concern.” Eridan is almost concerned by how easily he snatches it out of his hands, but he justifies it with the usual excuses – Eridan let him do it; Eridan didn’t care much about the journal anyways.

Through the few pages of the journal he’d flickered through, there’d been pairings of everyone except him. He tried not to let this bother him.

He finds something else to distract him and-

What the fuck were his crosshairs doing lying broken on the floor

There they were, lying in a heap outside a treasure chest, snapped in half. He would’ve liked to say ‘snapped clean in half’, but that implies a straight cut that gives some hope of it being repaired. Nope, it was broken beyond hope. There were mechanisms dangling out, a bit of the energy stream supplier showing within its oblong case. He had abandoned it, sure, but it was still an ancient artifact. He had still wanted it to be preserved.

A bit of perspiration was coming unto Equius.

The highblood at this point appeared to be shaking a little, rather distressed. He was shifting the pieces together, trying to make a whole out of them, but no matter how well-versed he was in history it came from, he wasn’t well-versed in the engineering needed to put it back together.

“Ampora, there are more important things to get to. We need to meet back up with the main group-“

The highblood was on in him in a minute, all rage and claws and anger and disappointment and fists and his wiry build was muscular enough to prove some resistance, but he was fighting Equius, and if you’re fighting Equius you might as well be fighting an elephant.

Eridan hit the ground, a large welt building on his cheek from where his peer slapped him. Equius knows the art of putting one down gently, soft enough to not break anything but hard enough to remove opposition. 

“Eridan, calm down and let’s continue moving. You may be highblood and violence may be your natural tendency, but now is not the time to turn on others in a flash of anger.” 

Equius does a check of his own wounds – just a few scratches along the arms. The veil life can be rather frustrating at times.

Equius walks away, and after a few seconds Eridan follows after him. The seadweller is too desperate not to.  
-_-_-

Equius keeps on walking down the hall, and he knows exactly where he’s headed, even if he doesn’t really want to go there.

Part of him just wants to prove a point to Eridan, that one can watch their loved ones die and kill ones whom they admire in turn, and not go through the fuss of such unneeded moods of anger. He was a highblood, civilized and calm and composed, at all times, and he wasn’t expecting to be so unnerved.

There wasn’t much to say about the scene before him, other than that it was an aftermath. He saw Gamzee, Nepeta had jumped out to save him, promptly got killed, and Equius couldn’t let that go without vengeance, and as a result Gamzee is lying there with a neck twisted, a bit of bruise on him and a limb smashed off.

What’s more distressing is Nepeta: He had tried to arrange her body nicely after her death, talked her through her final moments, but there isn’t anything to hide the fact that she is horrifically dead. Her head is clearly smashed in, and her think pain is clearly leaking out a little, and yes, there is clearly a bit of her skull showing and a bit of it smashed on the floor. 

There’s also quite a bit of blood on the floor, but it’s crusted and dry and he can pretend it’s just paint.

"I'm sorry about Nepeta," Eridan says, and he’s about as awkward about it as one would be when you’re seeing a bunch of wrecked bodies. “I know it’s hard to lose someone that you care about a lot. Yeah.”

Equius tries to figure out how much honesty there is to the statement, if it’s a genuine attempt at comfort or a genuine attempt at getting someone on his side. 

Eridan starts drumming his fingers impatiently. “It’s bad for your health to look at dead bodies for too long, numbskull. You start thinking too much.”

The two of them move on.  
-_-_-_-

One of the bad things about going too far about teal on the hemospectrum is that it tends to lead to emotional inconsistencies. In lowbloods this same phenomenon can lead to enhanced mental abilities, but in most highbloods it just leads to rage and rage and more rage. 

Rage broils beneath Equius’s mind, a deep dark ocean of anger barely suppressed by decency and reason. 

It’s not a really nice thing to have in one’s mind. It stalks and it hisses and preys on perfectly innocent things, much like you imagine Nepeta to have done before he met her. 

Sometimes he looks at the troll walking alongside him, and wonder how it’d feel to snap his horns until they tore to pieces, to rip his fins off and break his spine and hear him curdle with screams. It’s not that he’s going insane, he tells himself. If he were back in Alternia, he would’ve simply shifted to a moody troll who occasionally needed to wean off his anger through reaping apart the occasional passerby. It’s that he’s stuck in this veil, this oversized veil that they’ve been walking around for hours. It’s that everyone around him is dying, and if they manage to find the rest of the trolls, figure out some short of plan, there’s a pretty good chance that they’ll be dead.

Sometimes he remains decent, but sometimes he just wants to see more blood. 

“Eridan, if it’s not too much trouble right now, could you hit me?”

He pauses slowly, turns around slowly, and looks you down slowly. His muscles are once again tense, and there is the same rage in his eyes, and one can’t be sure if it’s stronger due to being a seadweller or not. He punches him, and it hardly hurts.

“Eridan, show some strength.”

He punches him, and it almost stings.

Equius lets the mild pain and discipline calm him down, but it only helps a fraction. 

Eridan, on the same hand, also doesn’t look much better off.

They walk and walk and walk, and they’re at the point where they aren’t even searching anymore, but are just a unique flavor of lost – the kind of lost where they don’t even really want to find their way out anyways. 

It’s strange, the way one’s mind wanders when one walks in silence. It goes into the crannies of ones brain, and drags out all the bad things that one doesn’t try to think about. It lays them all out on the table, little slabs of raw meat bleeding out.

The two of them eventually reach one of the stairs that reach up to the surface of the asteroid, and they can see around them a long ways. All the other platforms that reach up to the surface can be seen, and on one far away, there are a few specks, one orange and one red. 

“There’re the people you’re looking for so much, now we can go over and probably legitimate do something.”

Equius nods and walks back down the stairs, now knowing the general direction to wander in. He pauses a bit, noticing that he isn’t being followed.

“Eridan, come on,” Equius has lost his formality around the highblood by now, and is a bit urgent in this message.

“I’m going to stay here. I doubt any of them want me.”

The stronger of the two facepalmed. The seadweller was known for his moods, but he was hoping that he wasn’t going to have one in the midst of this mess. “Eridan-“

He snaps around and glare at you. “You’re the Heir of Void, aren’t you? We’re in a void, aren’t we? Why aren’t you doing anything about this!?”

“I could say the same for you, Prince of Hope.”

Eridan calms down, and the flash of emotion leaves his eyes, replaced by something much foggier. “I’m a goddamned lousy prince, Equius. You should know this by now.”

“I wouldn’t say that. You are efficient at throwing your weight around.”

“Idiot, I mean actually ruling over things. Anyone can just go and throw their weight around, but whenever I try to get anything from anyone, nobody listens. None of you listened, none of my consorts listened, not even my own aspect listened when I tried to assert myself over it! It just exploded in my face!”

There’s a silence, the kind of silence only found after a loud outburst in an empty area. It’s awkward, certainly, the way it’s always awkward whenever someone exposes part of their heart without meaning to.

“Ampora, maybe if you had simply done something other than propose to everyone romantically, you would have garnered better results.”

It was always curious how the players always seemed to reflect their own lands in a way. Nepeta always had the sweetness and flavor of little cubes and tea, and Terezi always pulsed with the energy indigenous to the Land of Thought and Flow. It’s only now that Equius notices that Eridan’s sharp edges and long figure move with the jaggedness of wrath, the ever swelling rage of angels. Eridan has killed, but it’s only now that the blueblood has ever begun to think of the seadweller as dangerous.

“You honestly thought I was even attracted to any of you? You honestly thought I wanted to pail most of you? Maybe Feferi, but I’d lost enough hope of that. Just, if someone said yes, that meant that at least someone respected me, that at least someone held me in some regard.”

One more pause, but it’s always hard to fill a silence. Eridan’s already had his say, and there’s not much there is to it. Equius wants to say something, but everything that comes to mind sounds too comforting, too pale.

“I want to kill something right now,” Eridan says, and his wrists flex a bit. They grab out a bit, reaching for something that isn’t quite there. He’s not quite a danger yet, but he’s getting there. “Don’t you? Aren’t you going crazy too?”

“I’d say all of us are a bit insane at this point, Eridan.”

The two move on.  
-_-_-

At some point, the lower of the two loses it. The young prince simply watches as his companion destroys a small room, punching steel walls and smashing boxes and making even the air in the room unrecognizable, filling it up with the debris of wreckage. 

In the end, Equius is heaving and sweating and exhausted, and there’re bruises on his hands from punching so hard and it appears that one of his fingers might actually have broken in the moment of the fit.

“Was that really necessary? “ Eridan says, impassive. There might’ve been a point where he’d have interrupted him, maybe have even tried to stop Equius from destroying the room, because the meteor was supposed to last. Eridan had stopped caring about a lot of things.

Equius lets out a dry, rasping “Yes.”  
-_-_-_-_-

Sometimes Eridan will stop as he walks, and slump against the wall, gently at first, but soon he’s sliding down and he’s on the floor and he can’t stop shaking, and soon he begins screaming, and yelling, and it’s not screaming and yelling at Equius. It’s not really screaming or yelling at anything. Equius will attempt to lift him up, get him to keep moving, but Eridan simply screeches and lashing, screaming that he’s awful, that they’re both awful, they keep people who loved them, why are they even alive right now? 

“What’s really the point,” Eridan screams at some point, shuddering to a stop, and it’s interesting how Eridan reaches his rages, Equius thinks. Most simply rise up and up and up to a peak, but Eridan just falls, and keeps on falling, and eventually he just hits the ground, and there’s no way to get back up but to claw one’s way up through screaming and yelling and tearing.

Equius endures these periods, it takes a lot to get Equius to flinch in the way of physical injuries.

In the end, Equius becomes used to the ebb and flow of these moods.  
-_-_-

They rest from the walk, and Eridan lays himself unceremoniously across Equius’s lap – not quite in the sexual way, but like a cat that just needs a spot to rest.

It’s a lot like Nepeta, in a way, though less in character to the true spirit of a feline and more akin to the true spirit of a fish left too long out of water.

There’s enough blood leaking out of them from small injuries – those injuries caused by mindless destruction of rooms and small breakdowns. Sometimes it leaks out, and they sketch things, small things, but those things never come out to anything.

“I’m sorry,” Eridan says, and Equius is confused, but it only takes him a moment to realize it’s one of those strange moments where Eridan reaches out to talk to no one. 

Sometimes moiraillegiance isn’t effective. Sometimes it’s just trying to catch whatever is running out of each other’s mind and putting it back in, trying not to think about what’s flowing through their finger nor about how much longer they might have before there’s nothing left to catch.

Sometimes moiraillegiance is sad, Equius decides.

“There’s really nothing left, is there,” Eridan says, and this time he’s talking to Equius. “Everyone we care about is dead.”

_-_-_

It’s when they’re finally arriving at the scene where all the survivors have gathered, several sad and broken survivors, that he notices. He noticed Eridan carefully uncaptchalogue his wand, and it’s sparkling angrily, and everyone is looking at them, just looking-

It’s at this point that Equius realizes that he doesn’t care what happens anymore.

He watches, and all is lost in a flash of white light. 

The green and purple are still tainted on their clothes.


End file.
